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American Home Front, The: 1941-1942

American Home Front, The: 1941-1942

In nearly three thousand BBC broadcasts over fifty-eight years, Alistair Cooke reported on America, illuminating our country for a global audience. He was one of the most widely read and widely heard chroniclers of America—the Twentieth Century’s de Tocqueville. Cooke died in 2004, but shortly before he passed away a long-forgotten manuscript resurfaced in a closet in his New York apartment. It was a travelogue of America during the early days of World War II that had sat there for sixty years. Published to stellar reviews in 2006, though “somewhat past deadline,” Cooke’s The American Home Front is a “valentine to his adopted country by someone who loved it as well as anyone and knew it better than most” (The Plain Dealer [Cleveland]). It is a unique artifact and a historical gem, “an unexpected and welcome discover in a time capsule.” (Washington Post) A portrait frozen in time, the book offers a charming look at the war through small towns, big cities, and the American landscape as they once were. The American Home Front is also a brilliant piece of reportage, a historical gem that “affirms Cooke’s enduring place as a great twentieth-century reporter” (American Heritage).

Manufacturer: Brilliance Audio on CD Unabridged


Price Range: $13.39 - $39.95


American Home Front, The: 1941-1942
User Reviews
We sometimes forget
rating: 4

In this day of superhighways (both concrete and electronic),jumbo jets,fast food, fast cars and deluxe/designer everything, it is startling to be brought back to our not so distant past, to remember from whence we came, what we have accomplished in the intervening years and how much more we have to accomplish. Alistair Cooke accomplishes all this in a book that may bring you up sharply. He focuses on the lives of everyday people in the years leading up to WW2, ignoring the sound bites from Washington,NY and the media. It is a revealing book and well worth reading.



Edifying but bloodless work that never really coheres
rating: 3

I can't quite pin down why I didn't like this book more than I did. I suppose it's because Cooke seems to have been caught between writing a travelogue and composing vignettes (a la "Letters from America") about the country he saw as he traveled about during the years in question. The resulting book never really engaged this reader as coherent work to be enjoyed as a whole. I wonder if this may have played a role in his decision to never pursue getting it published during his lifetime.

To be sure, there's no mistaking Cooke's gifts for observation and making the pungent or amusing aside. His attention to matters of racial discrimination, his tracking of the impact--or lack thereof--of the incipient war on daily life as he progresses, and his snapshop portraits of his various stops along the way, for example, all bring the world to life and help add color to our mental portrait of that time (assuming, of course, you weren't alive then, or don't study American cultural/social history).

But the work seems rather lifeless somehow. Maybe I've just grown too accustomed to the more personalized travel writing of Bill Bryson or something like Steinbeck's "Travels with Charley," but while I feel like I came away with some useful and interesting information, I don't feel like I'll ever really be compelled to pick it up again as a pleasure read. This is certainly edifying--never a bad reason to pick up a book--but I'd look elsewhere if you want entertainment, too.


the american home front 1941-42
rating: 3

I have read the intire book. I find his style to be a bit hard to stick with, but the content was worth the effort.


A Writer's Writer
rating: 5

Anyone who aspires to write should read Alistair Cooke and E.B. White. These worthies model style in every sentence. My memories of Cooke stretch back to the 1950s when he hosted Omnibus so it's doubly pleasurable to read this wonderful account from the previous decade.


great book on life as it was
rating: 5

Excellent writing, nostalgic now, documentary of America then.




American Home Front, The: 1941-1942









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